Raiatea & Huahine (pt 3.) December 22 2005

Hello everyone.Well, I was just telling Rose this morning, Dec. 14, that my next letterwon't have much interesting to say. Basically we are in the rainy seasonand doing not much of anything. Fortunately, due to the foresight andgenerosity of the captain, our time has been spent entertaining ourselveswith recently acquired old serials like Flash Gordon and old mysteries. Forthose of you who are also fans of this stuff, Amazon has some great deals on"value packs" like $30 for 50 old mysteries, etc. But I'm getting ahead ofmyself.We returned to Raiatea about 2 weeks ago to pick up our water maker parts.They were in Papeete, but, of course, nothing is simple here. Seems thegovernment just raised a bunch of taxes, and they had a week long generalstrike precluding FedEx delivering here. They did finally arrive, and we nowhave water. While waiting, we went on the dock at Uturoa, and, believe itor not, someone ripped off our flag one night, and the next, we heard somestrange noises. Not much worry as we are locking ourselves in at nightafter the robbery, but then, the third night, we had another boarder--at 10pm this time. The captain successfully chased him off--crackhead, we think,and thank God, we didn't get Rose's imitation of Jamie Lee Curtis screamingin Halloween again!!. She did threaten him with our defense system--a SammySosa baseball bat. The fuel dock watchman heard me yelling at this guyand stood watch all night with Joey and a stalk of marijuana (which is amajor crop here in Polynesia). We moved the next day, never to returnto that dock.Over at the Carenage, the boatyard which is going to do the engines and lookafter the boat while we're gone, it was very rainy, ruining our plans tovisit Taha'a after we fixed the watermaker. So we just hung out, did a fewboat things, and listened to Joey plead, grovel and beg to leave early tovisit hischick in Papeete. After we got our mail, which included the latest issueof Latitudes and Attitudes, I wrote the editor, Bob Bitchin, because he hadwritten up a favorable review of Apex dinghies, the manufacturer that isstiffing me on my warranty. Anyway, he got right back to me, and,coincidentally, has also just bought his third Apex, but he did forward mymail to George, the owner.Unfortunately, nothing heard back from those guys, and we're holding thedinghy together with chewing gum and bailing wire until we can get to NewZealand and send a new one back here. The Zodiac dealer in Papeete wants$8,000 for a new one-screw that, and screw Apex too. Sort of hard to assertoneself 5,000 miles away.In order to get into the Christmas spirit, the captain played "Grandma GotRun Over by a Reindeer" to the chagrin of the crew, but we also got out allthe Christmas stuff--we have a really cool 3 foot high fiber opticstree--and decorated the boat. AND, the really good news is Polynesians musteat turkey on Christmas. At Thanksgiving we searched everywhere andcouldn't even find a capon, but, last week we got a nice Butterball orsomething like that on one of our normal shopping runs. Yes!!!So we dropped Joey on Monday, Dec 12, and off we went to Huahine for theholidays. We spent the rest of Monday and all of Tuesday enjoying oursolitude and watching the aforementioned videos (Rose can't wait on theserials and we watched all 13 episodes of Ace Drummond yesterday) due toheavy rain. However, today we got off the boat and saw our friend Joe--theguy who also got robbed, and, guess what, they caught the guys and recoveredsome of our stuff. Of course, the first trip to the Gendarmerie wasfruitless, but when we returned at 2, we got back Tim's camera, the cellphone, the keys and ,most important, Rose's address book--pommies call them"filofax". No luck on thecash, the other camera, sandals or, sadly, the Jack Daniels.Time to end this for now and get Christmas greetings sent to you all. We'respending Christmas down on the south side of Huahine that we liked so muchwhen we were here the last timeand then back to the town for New Year' Eve. Another guy I played pokerwith invited us to a big party at what amounts to a private hotel here. SoJoyeux Noel (Merry Christmas) and Bonne Annee (Happy New Year) to everyonefrom the crew of Rendezvous Cay.Tim and Rose